It is good to greet you all this
morning and to find so many present in
our service, in our morning worship, to wait
upon the Lord.
May he enable us as now we come
to meditate upon his word, to hear again
his own gracious and sovereign voice, addressing us
as surely as he did Abram and Sarai
of old, as recorded in Genesis 16.
Now our subject this morning, Abram, friend of
God, another blunder.
It sounds contradictory, does it not?
That the man who earned for himself the
title friend of God, should on the way
to the acceptance of such a title make
many blunders.
Well that's exactly what happened and it has
something to say to us.
The biblical characters are never men and women
of straw.
Biblical characters, the godly personalities of Scripture, are
real men and women, facing the realities of
daily life.
And the Scriptures inspired by the Holy Spirit
to be recorded for your profit and mine
relate to realities, not to mythical concepts.
And I trust that we can already sense
something of the promise that lies in this
fact.
That a man such as Abram, one of
the great men of faith of all times,
blundered hopelessly, terribly, dismally, on the way toward
a full understanding of the will of God,
and in order to come into the way
of a perfect implicit obedience to the God
who had called him.
Now regretfully, therefore, we have to descend from
the lofty heights of spiritual excellence marked out
in chapter 15.
We've got to come down now, down to
the valley below.
And it's rather dismal and it's rather dark.
And if you're afraid of looking at the
things of the darkness, well I guess you'd
better read chapter 15 whilst we are going
on with chapter 16.
But the fact is, you see, you and
I do not simply have our mountaintop experiences.
If we are living a real Christian life
with its battles, there are times when we
go through dark places.
Some of us tease ourselves and blind ourselves
to the realities.
It's a very bad thing to do.
May the Lord help us to face ourselves
this morning, even as we look at the
experience of this great man, our father Abram.
Now the first thing I would like you
to look at is, I would like us
to see the picture that we have here
of a doubt that became infectious.
A doubt that became infectious.
Abram's earlier unbelief and fear, and by the
way, you remember chapter 15 began with that.
God addressed that kind of situation.
May I refer back to chapter 15?
After these things, the word of the Lord
came to Abram in a vision.
Fear not, Abram.
Now God is not addressing himself to a
non-existent situation.
God, knowing the heart of Abram, saw there
a reigning, ruling, overwhelming fear, so great that
it needed to be immediately addressed by God
himself.
And that fear, as we read the chapter,
we will discover, that fear was particularly related
to the fact that Abram could not believe
that God would fulfill his promise of a
seed to him.
Fear and faith are always very closely related.
Now Abram's earlier unbelief and fear then, had
not only rubbed off on Sarai, but the
renewed promises of God that we have in
chapter 15, following the first verse, that caused
staggering Abram to become steady again.
You remember that beautiful word, how he steadied
himself upon his God, and God reckoned that
to him for righteousness.
Now, the unbelief of Abram rubbed off on
Sarai, but the faith of Abram never got
through to her.
It is always easier for us to influence
other people in terms of unbelief, than it
is to create faith.
And I think there is something here which
is exceedingly important, especially for those of us
who are in the wedded state.
This incident has much to say about the
spiritual influence that husbands and wives have on
each other within the marriage bond.
It indicates how doubts can be so easily
transferred from one to another, almost unconsciously.
And how they can even become stronger by
the process of transmission, because Sarai's doubt was
even stronger than Abram's at any point.
But she got it, she caught it from
Abram.
Now let's look at the picture just a
little.
Sarai appeared to interpret God's delays in providing
the first seed, the first child that was
ultimately to become a race, a nation.
Sarai appeared to interpret God's delays as if
they were necessarily denials to her.
And Sarai said to Abram, verse 2, Behold
now the Lord has prevented me from bearing
children.
Go into my maid.
It may be that I shall obtain children
by her.
And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai.
Assuming that she believed that God's promise still
applied to Abram, she doubted the relevance of
God's promise as far as she herself was
concerned.
Abram may still have a place, a very
central place in the purposes of God, as
the father of a multitude and the head
of a race.
All right.
But she says looking at Abram, You, but
not me.
After all they have been in the land
for ten whole years.
And the promise was made soon after they
arrived in the land.
And there is no sign of a child.
And she concludes that God's delay in fulfilling
his promise must now be interpreted as God's
denial to her of the privileges of motherhood.
Sarai failed to see, you see, the full
significance of the marriage bond in his, in
God's sight.
When God brought Sarai and Abram together and
made them man and wife, he had a
purpose for both of them.
God never brings men and wife together in
this way except that he has a purpose
for the two together.
In Peter's immortal phrase, we are to look
upon one another as heirs together of the
grace of life.
And that's the biblical portrait.
But dear old Sarai, she couldn't see it.
God may still have a purpose for Abram,
but not for me.
I've waited ten whole years and there's not
one child.
What's this talk about the seed as multitudinous
as the stars in the heaven or the
sand by the seashore?
It's no good.
It must be for Abram, but not for
me.
The next thing I want you to notice
is that though Sarai took God's delay as
his denial of the privilege of motherhood to
her, yet she still dutifully desired the fulfillment
of God's promises to Abram.
What I want to stress is this.
She didn't turn sour.
She didn't sulk.
There was absolutely nothing selfish about Sarai.
She dearly loved her husband and she was
pledged as best she then knew how and
knew herself.
She pledged herself to be loyal to him
and to help him to achieve God's purpose
for him.
Now that very unselfishness and affection was the
key in measure to the disaster that ensued.
Oh, we live in a queer and a
crooked world since the fall.
You see, knowing her unquestioned loyalty to him,
Abram in turn received some suggestions from Sarai
without examining them objectively.
Now had they not been so much in
love with one another, had they not had
such respect for one another, Abram would have
critically examined what his wife suggested.
But dear old Sarah now brings some suggestion
to Abram and Abram, because he loved his
wife and he knew that his wife was
loyal to him, uncritically, uncritically accepted the notion
and as we shall see he proceeds to
act upon it.
Now this is something that can often happen
where genuine affection reigns.
Such people cease to be properly critical of
one another.
You know there is a place within the
marriage bond for an honest appraisal of one
another.
And if we are to be helpers fit
for one another, there must be some time
in our lives when we can really speak
to one another and say to one another,
look such and such a thing is wrong.
The moment we become so infatuated with one
another that we are incapable of doing that,
the marriage enters into a dangerous situation.
And so what happens here, we're going to
see it in a moment, is this.
Abram had turned down the suggestion that Lot
should be his heir.
Abram had also turned down the suggestion that
Eliezer of Damascus should be his heir and
would believe God to fulfill the promise he
had made concerning a seed.
But when Sarai suggests something, Abram gullibly takes
it in and he walks into a trap,
not meant to catch him, not meant to
hurt him, meant by Sarai to do him
good and to bring about the fulfillment of
God's promises, but nevertheless hatched out of sheer
unbelief in God.
And what is born, what is conceived out
of unbelief in God cannot be good for
man or for God.
That brings us to the second thing here,
the design that appeared ingenious.
Brooding over the problem, Sarai thought over a
plan that appeared quite ingenious to her.
I ought to add, of course, given the
moral climate of the day, and that's important,
she must have thought long about this issue.
How on earth is it possible for Abram
to be the father of a multitude and
I am incapable of producing the first link
in the chain, the first child?
And because she loved him, she wanted him
to be the father of the nation and
to enter into the enjoyment of what God
had apparently had in mind for her.
She didn't want to be the stumbling block.
She wanted to be the partner.
If she couldn't be the partner in one
sense, in the primary sense, she would be
in a secondary.
At last she thought she had a plan.
From the gloomy dungeon of her unrelieved unbelief,
there was one way whereby God's promise could
be fulfilled perhaps, and that was for her
to give her own maid Hagar to Abram
in the hope that she, Hagar, would bear
a child instead of or rather for Sarai.
Now we need to fill in the background
there.
According to the custom of the age, of
course, the mistress of the house, the wife,
owned her slaves.
And any child born to a slave in
these circumstances did not belong to the slave
at all.
On the contrary, the child belonged to the
mistress of the house, the lady of the
house.
So you see the Bible is quite right.
This is really what Sarai had in mind.
It was a humbling thing to do.
Not many wives who loved their husband would
ever dream of this.
They were sacrificing it.
She was sacrificing her own position, and she
was giving the girl to Abram to be
a second wife.
She was introducing polygamy into the situation.
I won't say anything about that other than
that it was not commanded nor commended by
God.
But she introduced it, and she did it
because she wanted the best for Abram.
Then we must notice that this practice was
not only possible, but it has happened a
myriad times in history.
We have records of its being acted upon
in places as far apart as Ur of
the Chaldees and Cappadocia.
And in such cases there was no stigma
at all upon anyone concerned.
It was done.
It was the done thing in certain certain
places and at certain times.
It is clearly contrary to the biblical principle
and to the biblical idea, but it was
done.
So we read that Abram agreed to what
Sarai said.
Here you see is where he was gullible.
If he did not love her as he
did, if he were not as sure of
her affection for him, she might have questioned
the whole thing.
But Abram believed that she loved him, and
she respected him, and he trusted her.
And so he didn't question, he didn't now
sift what was right from what was wrong.
Abram agreed to what Sarai said.
So after Abram had been living in Canaan
ten years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian
maidservant Hagar and gave her to her husband
to be his wife.
Now as to the intention, Sarai's plan was
clearly meant to benefit Abram and posterity.
As to its inspiration, Sarai's plan was the
product of her unbelief in God and of
her genuine loyalty to her husband.
I'm stressing these things.
As to the application to ourselves, it takes
little imagination or ingenuity to see how very,
very relevant it is.
The precise circumstances may not apply in anyone's
life present here this morning, but the principles
most certainly do apply in the lives of
all of us.
Out of the many possible applications of the
passage, suffice it now to refer to one
only, namely the ever-present tendency of unbelief
to use carnal methods to bring about God's
will.
If you want me to put it differently
in the language of King James, to use
fleshly methods to bring about spiritual end.
Now what I have in mind is expertly
set forth by Paul in his letter to
the Galatians, and that in direct reference to
this very passage.
In Galatians 4 22 and 23 he writes
in this way, for it is written that
Abram had two sons, one by the slave
woman and the other by the free woman.
His son by the slave woman was born
in the ordinary way, but his son by
the free woman was born as the result
of a promise.
The one child then was born in the
ordinary way, as the NIV puts it, or
as the King James Version puts it, according
to the flesh.
And the other was born through promise, faith,
trusting the promise.
The former was born according to the flesh,
not simply because he was the offspring of
the normal processes involved in procreation, but also
and especially in as much as he was
the produce of human reasoning, the product of
human reasoning, human planning and scheming apart from
faith.
He was the product of basic unbelief in
God, and out of unbelief human beings set
about to scheme and weave their own plans.
He was born according to the flesh in
that sense.
Ishmael, let me put it to you very
bluntly, was a forced child.
Hagar had no say in the matter.
She was put in the arms of Abram,
and as a slave girl she had nothing
to do but to accept what was coming.
She was a forced child.
Isaac was a child of promise.
Abram and Isaac had to wait, and wait,
and wait, until God, when everything seemed absolutely
impossible, when God put the little babe in
Sarai's barren womb, and then she gave birth.
Now if you want concrete illustrations, I could
go further.
I can give you two, for example, from
the Old Testament which are very relevant.
First of all, there is Jacob.
You remember how Jacob robbed Esau of his
birthright?
Now that birthright, according to the scriptures, was
meant for Jacob.
God planned that Jacob should have the birthright.
But in due course, in God's time.
But Jacob wasn't prepared to wait for God's
time, so he took matters into his own
hands.
You remember the story.
I don't need to go into the details.
Jacob decided, okay, those promises are too long
being fulfilled.
I'll get it, and I'll get it now.
You see, he acted according to the flesh,
rather than by faith in the promises.
You have the same kind of thing, different,
but the same kind of thing nevertheless, in
principle, in the life of Moses.
Seeing the Egyptian smite a Hebrew slave, Moses
took matters into his own hands.
And he says, we can't have this kind
of thing.
I'm a Jew, I'm a Hebrew.
And he got hold of the Egyptian, and
he just slew him.
Downright slew him in cold blood.
Now, God had given certain promises to those
very slave people, and to that very boy
or man that was slain.
God had given promises to the Jews in
Egypt, that after so many years of captivity,
he would bring them into the land.
But the time had not yet arrived, you
see.
And so God had not yet called Moses
to get on with the job.
The time was not ripe.
There are specific statements in the Old Testament
which refer to that.
We won't go after them this morning.
But the time was not right.
But dear old Moses, full of carnal enthusiasm
at that point, steps in and tries to
do it in the power of the flesh.
And he nearly lost his own life.
Now, to apply to ourselves the principle as
a wide application, but none so important as
in the realm, shall I say with bated
breath, of claiming God's promises for the salvation
of our own children.
Oh, mothers and fathers here this morning, I
know how every one of you would dearly
tear out both eyes if only you saw
your own sons and your own daughters dancing
to the tune of grace, rejoicing in the
joys of the Lord, acknowledging him as Savior,
standing out as soldiers of the cross, making
a clear confession.
What would you not give?
What would you not do?
If the grace of God is in your
heart and the Spirit of God is within
you, then you'll give anything, you'll do anything,
you'll go anywhere for that.
But you see, the tragedy in that situation
is this, that we can have forced children
as well as children of promise.
And there is a way psychologically and otherwise
even to force our own children and our
own loved ones and the people in our
homes and the people in our offices sometimes,
there is a way whereby we can almost
force them to make a decision.
Just as dear Hagar was forced to make,
she didn't make a decision, it was made
for her.
God has given the saints a promise, a
covenant that relates to our children.
Now we Reformed people believe that.
And the thing that he wants us to
do is to hold on to the promises
and to plead the promises and to guard
our children and to bring over and over
again his promises back to him and say,
we trust you.
And sometimes we have to leave our children
to wander into the wilderness until they become
scarred and scared.
And in their own time, and as they
think of their own will, they come back
in penitence and recognize the God of glory
that covenanted with their parents.
Oh, this is a very important principle that
we have here this morning.
And I refer to it because I believe
it is as relevant this morning as ever
it was.
Don't, don't for God's sake, for the glory
of his son and the well-being of
his church, don't force your children to make
premature decisions.
A church of Ishmaels is a church that
will bring no glory to God and very
little joy to the home.
Wait for Isaac to be born.
Exercise faith in the promise.
Let God do his work.
Let him break down the rebellion and let
him change the heart and let him breathe
his Holy Spirit.
Wait for the babe to be born of
the Spirit by the promise.
That brings me to the last and the
main point here.
The damage that proved unspeakably injurious.
We can hardly conceive of a greater failure
and tragedy than that which accompanied Sarai's successful
scheme.
Excuse me.
You see, looking at things from the superficial
point of view, Sarai succeeded, but her success
was the greatest failure.
Oh, it produced a child to be Abram's
seed, all right, albeit not the seed of
promise.
But at the same time, it brought a
host of unwanted and desolating ingredients into their
married life and into the life of the
race.
We still reap a whirlwind harvest and we
don't know where it's going to lead us
to as nations because of this act.
The damage wrought by Sarai's faithless act can
be seen in part in the inspired record
of this very chapter, but only in part.
Let me just mention two or three things.
First of all, the damage emerging from Sarai's
scheme is seen in the marring of a
much-blessed marriage.
Her success led to a tragedy in the
marring of a marriage that had been much
blessed.
The act that produced a child also produced
much else beside Ishmael.
It produced fruit in the form of pride,
envy, jealousy, strife, and domestic friction.
Domestic friction that brings no glory to God
and no good to anyone.
The marriage of Abram and Sarai became clouded
and overcast even before young Ishmael was born,
whilst he was still in the womb.
These two that had been so infinitely blessed
by God now find that their whole life
is overcast.
That turbulent and jarring note begins when between
Sarai and Hagar.
Let me read to you verses 4 and
5.
And he went into Hagar and she conceived.
And when she saw that she had conceived,
she looked with contempt on her mistress.
And Sarai said to Abram, May the wrong
done to me be on you.
I gave my maid to your embrace.
And when she saw that she had conceived,
she looked on me with contempt.
And Sarai said to Abram, May the wrong
done to me be on you.
I gave my maid to your embrace.
And when she saw that she had conceived,
she looked on me with contempt.
May the Lord judge between you and me.
Now you notice Hagar's alleged contempt for her
mistress.
That is as clear from the scriptures as
well as from what she herself says.
Even if such contempt had been absent, even
if it had been absent, there would have
been days of strain and stress between Abram
and Sarai, almost necessarily at that point.
Because Sarai was sorely disappointed that she herself
had not been the mother of a child.
Whilst this young girl Hagar was jubilant that
she had been given the privilege.
Only grace could have averted the ensuing tensions
and the trials.
Even if Hagar had been reasonably placid and
Sarai as wise as she had previously been
unselfish.
But the arrogant pride of the young prospective
mother was gall to the bitter disappointment of
the aging Sarai.
And sparks began to fly.
Hagar's pride and contempt was a burning match
that set alight a corresponding envy and hatred
in Sarai's soul.
And my friends, when once you get envy
in a home, you have hell coming into
a home.
When envy is set loose, anything can happen.
Anything can happen.
De Bondone Giotto, the pioneer of fresco painting,
has put the world in his debt for
his artistic representation of this and of some
other vices.
You remember how the medieval church used to
speak of the seven supreme vices and the
seven supreme virtues.
Well now, we are not concerned with the
virtue of that classification but with the way
in which this great man depicted envy.
In the arena chapel in Padua, he has
given us his brilliant allegorical representation of the
seven deadly vices and their opposites, facing each
other in pairs on opposite walls.
Now this is an artistic representation.
Envy is a female figure.
Now, in case there are any feminists here,
so also is charity, so don't want you
to switch off.
Envy is a female figure who has long,
wide ears to catch every breath of rumor
that may hurt a neighbor's reputation.
That's envy.
Envy's got big ears.
And then, out of her mouth issues a
serpent tongue, swift to poison all things sweet
and tender.
This serpent coils back on itself and stings
the eyes of the envious person with blindness.
And the figure stands in flames representing the
fierce fire that consumes the heart that takes
pleasure in another's injuries and is made bitter
by somebody else's prosperity.
Blinded by envy, Sarai becomes unjust in her
judgment, irrational and harsh in her dealings with
Hagar and Abram too, for previously she found
no fault in him.
The next thing I want you to notice
is this.
Turbulence and strife soon emerged, even between Sarai
and Abram.
Sarai said to Abram, you are responsible for
the wrong I am suffering.
This is the NIV for verse 5.
I put my servant in your arms and
now that she knows that she is pregnant,
she despises me.
May the Lord judge between you and me.
You were responsible.
You were responsible, she says to Abram.
Now you can't miss the irrationality there.
She isn't thinking straight.
She says at the one breath, I put
her into Abram's arms.
I put her in Abram's arms.
I was responsible and yet you were responsible.
You see, this is what happens when you
have envy reigning.
A person becomes incapable of rational thought.
Gone is the large-heartedness and the genial
liberality that only a little while ago was
prepared to abandon anything for Abram's sake.
And the object of her previous love has
become the butt of her infamous charges that
he somehow was responsible.
She tries to blame the blameless and she
does so simply because the balance of her
judgment has been disturbed by envy.
She both takes the blame and gives it
to another.
Now if Sarai attempts to blame the blameless,
Abram loses his balance too and proceeds to
allow the unjustifiable to take place.
In his tent, casting all the blame upon
the young maid, putting no blame at the
hands of Sarai whom he so dearly loved,
casting all the blame on the young maid
Hagar and blindly turning away from its true
owner, Abram unworthily says to Sarai, your servant
is in your hands.
Let's put it literally, your slave is in
your hands.
Do with her whatever you think best.
Then Sarai mistreated her and she fled from
her.
Now this was most unworthy.
You see this is Abram lost his balance.
This is Abram incapable of acting judiciously and
honestly and spiritually and justly.
What happened?
Well you see this is what happens when
sin enters a home.
So the wrangling proceeds and a hitherto much
blessed marriage is marred and at least temporarily
very spoiled.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, there are some
relationships in life that simply can't be played
about with, not for a moment, and one
of them is marriage.
Let's move on.
The damage incurred by Sarai's apparently ingenious plot
did not only result in the marring of
a much blessed marriage but also it also
resulted in the misery of this much abused
girl, whose experience is described in the second
half of the chapter.
I can only refer to it.
Yes, you tamper with marriage, the marriage bond,
and you will discover to your dismay that
not only will your previous fellowship with your
partner become foul, but your spirit will soon
fester and that to such an extent that
everybody else is hurt.
The most innocent people will be dragged into
the meshes of the unholy mess that happened
here.
Now look at dear Hagar.
If anybody was innocent, here she was.
She had the fault of being proud of
what had happened, but she had been pushed
into it.
See her first of all escaping in terror
from the home of a saint and his
spouse.
Now the very statement of that fact makes
me shudder.
I don't know that we are capable of
really taking this in this morning.
Listen, Abram and Sarai were the most spiritually
honored people on the face of the whole
earth at that time.
The God of glory had appeared to Abram
not once nor twice and spoken to him
and entered into covenant with him and however
far his wife was involved in the same
response, she was in some measure involved with
him, though she lagged far behind and sometimes
doubted as we've seen.
Now there was no other couple on the
face of the earth in this same category,
but see what happened.
Though now pregnant and expecting her first born
from Abram, Hagar dashes from her angered mistress
in a bid for release from her clutches.
Better brave the bleak wilderness between her and
her home in Egypt than be subject to
Sarai's harshness and Abram's apparent neutrality any longer.
Deeply hurt, this homeless, helpless stripling of a
mother-to-be prefers the prospect of that
hazardous journey with her unborn child, her first
born in her womb.
With all the mystery appertaining thereto, she goes
out into the wilderness and she'd rather give
birth to a child in the desert than
live in the home of the godliest people
that the world ever knew at that time.
Oh men and women of God, let's be
careful how we treat those in our homes.
Their color may be black or white, they
may be rich or poor, they may be
cultured or illiterate, but I tell you you
and I cannot evade the judgment of God
when this kind of thing takes place.
When some little Hagar that we perhaps have
involved in sin is running away from the
home of a saint and would rather go
to the wilderness to die or to give
birth to her treasure than live with us.
Can I put it to you in a
slightly different way but it's the same principle.
If you would prefer to see it like
this, look at that helpless pagan youngster with
her forced child in her womb running back
through the desolations of a desert toward a
hospitable paganism in Egypt.
That was her ultimate destiny and she argued
with herself, I would rather be with the
pagans of Egypt than with these two that
know the God of glory.
Is there someone leaving your home in that
condition?
Is there someone who would rather be with
the pagans of the 20th century than bear
out your bitter tongue and spleen and misunderstanding
and other things that only heaven alone knows?
I say to you the book of God
is a book that's alive.
Genesis speaks today and it speaks to men
and women in the pulpit and in the
pew in Knox today.
I find a haunting complacency shattering challenge in
the spectacle of that young mother running away
and now I must close.
The damage incurred by Sarah's apparently ingenious plan
served to mar a much blessed marriage and
to intensify the misery of an already much
abused girl.
But there's one other thing and I want
you to notice it.
The only redeeming feature in this record is
that it so clearly points also to the
mercy of a much maligned God.
You know there is only one ray of
hope and one ray of glory in this
chapter 16 and that ray is is the
revelation of God as a God who cares.
Misrepresented by Abram and Sarai and doubtless misunderstood
if not maligned, God brightens the scene with
a glory of his presence.
He steps into the mess to transform it.
The very wilderness changes its face as God
steps on the scene.
Its forbidding features fade into insignificance as the
God of glory who appeared to Abram now
appears, albeit perhaps not in that in that
character, but to Hagar the slave girl.
God is infinitely better than the best of
his children you know and infinitely kinder than
the kindest of his people.
And God came down in the person of
his angel.
Take just a look and we're through.
The God of mercy appears to Hagar.
In his mercy he provided a well in
the wilderness for this parched, half-dead little
girl.
I don't know how old she is.
Perhaps I shouldn't have said little girl but
at least she was pretty young.
But God provided for her a well in
the wilderness and brought her to the well.
I think this is precious.
The angel of the Lord found her by
the spring of water in the wilderness, the
spring on the way to shore.
There was a well in the wilderness and
somehow or other the providence of God brought
this needy soul to the well.
A token of blessing already.
But we must go further.
In his mercy God sent an angel to
the well so that by the side of
the well like another greater than the angels,
the Lord of the angels, he spoke to
this much abused girl as he did later
to a much abused woman.
God sent an angel after Hagar, an angel
who could speak to her by name.
It is particularly worthy of note that the
angel did not refer to her as Abram's
wife but as Sarai's mistress.
As my only comment on polygamy, God doesn't
acknowledge it.
The angel addresses her as Sarai's servant.
And that's important.
She is not Abram's wife.
Let's pass from it.
God sent an angel who was really an
embodiment of the divine concern for this runaway
girl and said he, Hagar, maid of Sarai,
where have you come from and where are
you going to?
So somebody cares.
I don't know whether we need a little
bit of imagination here, but the thing that
comes home to me is this, you see,
somebody's asking a question that betokens concern.
The God of heaven and the angel from
heaven was concerned.
I wonder how Sarah had slept the nights
since Hagar was put out of the tent.
I wonder how Abram got on through the
day and the night.
Was he able to sleep?
Here someone was concerned and knew her by
name.
Moreover, the angel he sent came to take
her out of the wilderness.
The wilderness into which she was blindly running.
Oh what infinite mercy.
Did you notice how the angel does it?
One with a command and then a promise.
This is generally God's way.
He issues a command and then he gives
us a promise.
The command is, Hagar, go back and submit
yourself to your mistress.
But I've got a promise for you.
You too shall have children so many in
number that you won't be able to count
them.
What?
Yeah?
You're going to give birth to the child
that is in your womb and you shall
call him Ishmael and he'll be a certain
type of person and you are thus going
to be the mother of a vast multitude.
You too, Hagar.
Hallelujah.
Can you see it my friends?
Can you see it?
Can't you see the grace of God?
Don't you want to dance?
God loved Hagar, the runaway slave girl and
she at long last looked up in bewilderment.
And this is the climax to the whole
thing.
Thou God seest me.
Me?
Insignificant me.
I'm an Egyptian.
I'm not circumcised.
I don't belong to the circumcised.
I have none of the promises of the
covenants for me at the moment.
But thou God of Abram seest me, carest
for me, hast a promise for me.
Hallelujah.
And that's the climax.
That the weakest character in the whole story,
the character whom Abram has not been just
with and whom Sarah would have got rid
of and sent back into the darkness of
the wilderness to death may be, she is
loved of God.
And he comes and he leads her back
and the story goes on and history moves
ahead.
And the God of all creation weaves the
pattern of his purposes.
You in a wilderness today, perhaps due to
somebody else's sin, you're in a condition this
morning that is a sad one.
And you've almost ceased to expect anything.
Even when you come to the house of
God, you don't expect anything more than to
go through the routine.
Nothing more.
You don't mind sitting in the pews and
listening to a long dissertation like this from
time to time.
But you're not expecting anything.
Time was when perhaps you did, but you're
not expecting anything.
Listen my friend.
I want to come to you in the
name of the almighty God this morning and
I want to say to you, he sees
you.
His eye is on the sparrow and I
know he watches me.
You.
Hagar.
Or it may be a masculine name.
It makes no difference.
Yield to his command.
Trust his promises and you will find that
life will never be quite the same.
He'll take you out of the wilderness and
he'll lead you by a right way.
Let us pray.
Oh Lord, our God and our Father, thank
you for your word.
We sometimes use these words in our gratitude
and in our prayers.
Not always with meaning, not always with thought,
nor with feeling.
Lord, we mean it this morning.
Thank you for your word.
Were it only to come to us to
warn godly men and women of things that
can go wrong in the family and how.
And also that it comes to a little
girl, alas a stripling like Hagar.
With a child in her womb that she
had not wanted and you are coming to
her to be her God.
Father in heaven, draw us to yourself this
morning.
Each one of us in faith that like
Abram, not in this chapter 16, but in
chapter 15 and later on again before the
story is done and you finished with him.
Until we, whether we be men or women,
husbands or wives or single people, until we
are able to steady ourselves upon God and
trust and obey out of faith.
We ask it in his holy name.
Amen.